During my years of mobile development, I have heard the phrase “I have an idea for an app!” hundreds, if not thousands of times. Sometimes it would be from family members, sometimes my dentist during a cleaning, and sometimes from a naked dude standing in the sauna at the gym. Everyone pitches app ideas to me.

What I have learned from hearing so many pitches is this: apps really fall into one of three (sometimes four) categories. Allow me to elaborate.

1. The app has been done before

This is the most common category of app idea I hear. Usually, these are along the lines of, “It’s like Instagram, but for finger painters…”, etc… where the user takes an already proven idea and tries to tweak it in some way that they feel makes it new. Most of the time, these people have not even done any research to check as to whether or not a solution already exists.

The biggest hurdle in developing an app that has been done before is visibility; How are they going to get people to find the app and why should they choose it over the competition?

2. The app idea is too niche

Every now and again, I will hear a truly unique idea. Keep in mind, unique does not necessarily mean good. For example, I might hear, “I want an app that you can take photo of your cat, put it on a weather balloon, and send the balloon to space. ‘Catz In Spaze!’”. While this is unique, and technically feasible, one would be hard-pressed to make a real business out of it as it would be hard to get enough users on board to make it profitable.

3. There is a reason the app does not already exist

“I want an app to map out all of the grocery stores layouts in the world, so husbands can finally shop efficiently!” This is a great idea. It really is. So great, that I have literally heard it no less than ten times from various people over the years. Often times, I can predict when someone is about to pitch this particular idea, just by the setup: “You know how, like, shopping is hard, and like, you can’t find stuff…”.

There are some real technical hurdles surrounding this problem. While there are a few apps that have tried to solve it, no app will really accomplish the goal unless they have all of the following: total store participation, a large enough group for crowdsourced data, faster and more reliable GPS to know exactly where you are in the store, stores stop changing layouts, etc… You get the idea. There are a lot of reasons a solid solution for this does not exist.

There are other countless examples of app ideas falling into this category. Another fun one I get pitched is a killer app that converts any photo into a (caricature) [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caricature]. I’m sure someone will link one in the comments, but they are all mediocre at best.

Bonus #4: The app is used to augment their existing business

This is actually my favorite type of app to work with. The user has an existing business and wants to build something that benefits their business in the mobile space. I see ideas from evaluation tools for employees to apps that allow users to order products directly from the business.

I like these because the success of the business does not depend entirely on an app. Also, there is generally an audience built right in at launch time so everyone is happy.

Conclusion

I am not writing this post because I’m jaded and sick of hearing app ideas. Quite the contrary. I love hearing app ideas and would love to hear examples challenging the stereotypes that I have created here.

I give this spiel to clients from time to time and wanted a place that I could point them to, so feel free to send your clients to this post the next time you get the grocery store mapper pitch.

Since we are friends now, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

It cannot be overstated that writing down one’s goals is critical to acheiving them. Pair that with sharing them with others who might help keep you accountable and your probabilty of achieving those goals goes way up.

With this in mind, I have decided to share my 2015 goals here on my blog in hopes that I will do a better job of acheiving them in the new year. I tried to focus on more measurable goals rather than things like “eat better” and “exercise more”.

One of the most common questions I get from software consultants is whether or not to accept fixed bid contracts. In this post, I’m hoping to shed some light on fixed bid vs. time and materials contracts and help you make the best decision for the project at hand.

Let’s start with some definitions to help you better understand what I am talking about.

A fixed bidcontract is a contract where the developer and the client agree on a price and/or timeline up front for a particular contract. If additional time is needed, there must be some sort of change order issued to and signed by the client.

A Time and Materials contract is a contract where the developer and the client agree on an hourly rate for the development of a project. While there should be some initial estimates up front, the developer is not locked into a certain number of total hours/dollars. If more time is needed than stated in the original estimate, the developer has the freedom to continue as the client’s budget (and patience) permits.

Below, I’ll compare and contrast the pros and cons of both fixed bid and time and materials contracts. Note, this is just from my experience and your experience might vary. In fact, if it does, I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

Fixed Bid: Pros

You can potentially make a lot more money.
If you are a good estimator (or a bad one and the client accepts an overbid), then this is your chance to get paid whatever you want to get paid per hour. If you bid 100 hours and get it done in 50, you have essentially doubled your rate.

It’s easier to manage the pipeline.Generally, when you do a fixed bid contract (again assuming you are decent at estimations), fixing a contract allows you to plan out more contracts ahead of time. Typically the fixed cost comes with a (roughly) fixed timeline. This allows you to project future availability for yourself to work on other projects.

You know what you are building up front.If you have done your due diligence (gathering requirements, specking things out, etc…) there should be no surprises. Everything is already laid out for you and if the client wants to change anything, it will require a change order.

You are selling value instead of time.This is actually a hot topic lately. Many will argue never to sell by the hour as so much more goes into your rate than just time (your knowlege, history, expertise, etc…) The client wants to pay your for a solution to their problem and that’s infinitely much more valueable than your time.

It’s sometimes easier to land contracts.Some clients have a very specific budget. If you can provide a solution to them inside of their budget, then the contract is yours every time.

Fixed Bid: Cons

You can potentially lose a lot more money.
There is a joke that goes something like this: There are only 2 hard problems in software development, knowing when to expire a cache and accurately estimating working. Generally, the overzealous developer will error on the side of too few hours in order to ‘land the contract’ or ‘please the client’. This usually results in the developer bidding 50 hours and realistically working the 100.

Feature Creep.
Clients WILL feature creep. Feel free to tweet that or write it on your forehead. It’s just a fact of life. You, being the super nice developer that you are, will want to please the client and will say something like “it’s outside of scope, but I’ll make an exception”. Before you know it, the app has pivoted and you are building things WAY outside the scope of the initial contract.

Can I…? NO! Well, what about…? NO! Just This… NO, NO, NO!
With a fixed bid contract, if you are an experienced developer, you will ALWAYS be telling the client NO. If you are wondering why, see #2. While feature creep creates a tension, so does not allowing the client to change course, if needed.

It’s sometimes harder to land contractsIf I take a fixed bid contract, I generally error on the side of overbidding. This allows padding for things like QA, small changes, App Store submission, etc. Given the high bid, your client might baulk at the contract and attempt to outsource to India himself, where he will eventually spend double.

Time And Materials: Pros

Your work is always compensatedGiven that you are getting paid per hour, you can always count on a steady stream of revenue coming in. This is very comforting to developers since you know you will always get paid the rate you want for the work you do.

Landing contracts can be easierClients don’t always know what they want up front and the idea of not committing to a certain dollar amount is sometimes comforting. It also gives them MUCH MORE freedom to make changes and pivot down the road.

It gives clients the freedom to prioritize featuresThis is one of the biggest selling points that clients appreciate when I sell a time and materials contract. Given that my team follows a version of the agile development methodology, clients love that they have some insight as to how much each feature roughly costs. They can see the estimates and translate that into cost. If they feel a less important feature is too costly, they can prioritize the backlog to get more (less complex) features for the same price.

Less RiskSince you are only selling the client your time, you don’t necessarily owe them anything except work. Most of the time, time and materials contracts don’t even have an official scope of work attached.

Time And Materials: Cons

It doesn’t scaleYou can never make more money than your time will allow. If you charge $100/hour and work 40 hours/week, then you can never make more than $4,000/week unless you work more.

You are a commodityThe client doesn’t so much look at you as someone who is providing them a solution as they do a “resource”. You are perceived as less valuable and therefore could easily be replaced.

More RiskI know this type of contract is listed as less of a risk above, but there is also some riskiness to it. If you get in the weeds on a task or start introducing too many bugs, the client might feel that you are misleading them or incapable of performing and you risk getting released from the project.

Takeaways

While I have only scratched the surface in comparing these two types of contracts, I hope you have a better understanding about which route to pursue for you. My advice is to not be too rigid stating “I’m only going to use contract type X forever” because each contract situation may vary. Use your best judgement and make the decision that is best suited for each individual project and client. At some point in the future, I will post a few tips for making this decision based on some factors, but that is for a later date.

Until then, happy consulting!

P.S. Make sure to sign up for the newsletter below to be notified about awesome posts like this in the future!

When I first started out as an independent software developer, one of things that stressed me out the most was how to structure contracts that I sent to clients. Working for a consultancy in my previous work-life I had seen contracts before, however, I never really paid enough attention to them to know what type of content went into them.

After quite a bit of research, I found an invaluable resource. Over at techrepublic.com, Chip Camden posted a beautifully crafted consulting contract template. You can see the post and download the template here. This post was a lifesaver.

Chip goes over EVERY single section of the contract and gives an explanation of why it’s there. You can download the template and determine which sections you need for your business, based on his explanations. It doesn’t get much easier than that. Of course, I would still strongly suggest you fork over a couple hundred bucks and have a lawyer look over the contract before sending it off to clients.

How To Sign Contracts Online

Once you have your contract in place, you will need a way to get your clients to sign it. You could go the old-fashioned way of scanning, both parties signing, and scanning again OR you could use an online signature service. One that I use and highly recommend is RightSignature. I know those guys personally and have had a great experience with the service so far.

Here is my process:

This is what I have found works out well for my business. #proTip: I have my assistant do this now

Complete the contract blanks in regards to rates or any other information you want the client to see before they sign the contract.

Upload the contract template to Google Drive (optional). Make sure your company info is completed and all of the other fields (dates, signatures, etc…) are blanked out.

Once inside of your RightSignature account, you can connect to your Google Drive and import the document in. You can also upload them directly from your computer if you don’t want to use Google Drive.

RightSignature lets you put text fields and date boxes in the blanks and specify who is responsible for filling them out (you or the client).

Finally, add the signature fields at the bottom and send off the document for signing.

Once every party has filled out the needed information, the completed document is then sent to both parties via email.

Other Considerations

Often times, the client will have their own contracts for you to sign. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. However, make sure that you read over it carefully and run it by your lawyer. Don’t try to force your contract on a client that already has their own. They will usually not be open to this, in my experience.

Make sure to have an ‘exit clause’ in your contract in case things go sour. I seldom enter into fixed bid contracts so I usually have a clause where either party can cancel the contract with 7 days written notice. This also makes the client feel at ease as they are not trapped with you in an event where their situation changes.

Finally, be willing to be flexible. Sometimes clients might not like certain clauses in your contract. Be willing to change things like delivery dates, invoice dates, invoice periods, rates, etc… on a client to client basis. Obviously, use your best judgement here.

Conclusion

I hope that you have found this post useful and it saves you some time hunting down a contract template. I am always open to suggestions so if you see anything else that works for you, I would love to hear about it via email or in the comments.

*Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer and do not claim to be giving any real legal advice. I am simply stating how I do things with my business. Make sure to consult with a lawyer before engaging in any contracts.

“Hey Brandon, I have a killer project idea. Do you want to work on it? Please sign the NDA so we can talk.”

Early on when I first started consulting, I would have responded with something like “Sure send it over!” and signed the thing without hesitation. As of late, I have changed my view on NDAs; at least in this type of situation.

For those that don’t know, an NDA (non disclosure agreement) is a contract that is intended to protect the intellectual property of the client. They make a lot of sense, especially in the event that the deal goes sour. Say a client has some great idea for how to better take selfies that is going to revolutionize the selfie game. If he doesn’t get a developer to sign an NDA, the developer could potentially be free to discuss the idea with others, leaving the idea open to be stolen.

Why I Don’t Sign Preliminary NDAs

In the scenario I mentioned above, it would be very unwise of me to sign this NDA as I don’t have enough information about the product. This puts me as a consultant at a huge risk.

Say for example I am working on a photo/video sharing app (I get roughly 1 request a week for some spin on Instagram). Now, say the incoming project is some variant on photo sharing. If I sign the NDA, it now now puts me in a conflict of interest with my existing project.

Even if I knew that the project was a photo/video sharing application up front, I still would not sign the NDA. Much of the time (as mentioned above) clients want very similar applications. If I went around signing every single NDA that came across our desks, I would be out of business after the first client.

When I Will Sign NDAs

Well, the first thing that I do is ask for clarification on the project and tell them my NDA policy. I basically tell them that I am happy to sign the NDA if one of the following conditions are met:

There is extremely proprietary information (you can’t land a big enterprise contract without first signing an NDA)

We are ready for project kickoff and all parties are aware of any potential conflicts

In addition to that, if I am currently working on a project that is of similar type, it would be worthwhile to disclose that information to the potential new client (not the proprietary info, just that there is some overlap) so that they can choose whether or not to proceed. Better to possibly lose the new client than end up in a crazy legal battle.

If the new client refuses to give you any more information, then they are not worth your time. They will most likely be too challenging to work with down the road anyway.

NDAs Are Not Set In Stone

When you do finally decide to sign the NDA, know that it is not complete until you sign it. If you see something that you don’t like or want to add any additional clauses, feel free to propose those to the client. Most clients will be very understanding.

That being said, it’s VERY IMPORTANT that you read all the way through an NDA and possibly run it by your lawyer before signing.

Suggestion If You Want Your NDA Signed

If you want a developer to sign your NDA, make sure to give him enough information about your project for him to make an educated decision. If you just say “I want a photo sharing app” and expect an NDA signed, good luck. Make sure that they know there is proprietary information involved and that you are doing something different that must be kept private.

An NDA is not required if you want to make say an “Instagram Clone For Puppies” or a “Miley Cyrus Flappy Bird Clone”. Be sensitive to the uniqueness of your idea and decide if it really warrants an NDA.

Also note that developers are not out to steal your idea. They get pitched hundreds of ideas and most of the time your idea falls into 3 categories anyway:

It’s not unique

There is a technical challenge and that’s why it hasn’t been done (I get pitched a lot of ‘Map a grocery store so that my list will navigate me around’ ideas)

Your idea is so niche and so unique that the general audience won’t get it and it won’t be profitable anyway

I’m not saying that every idea falls into these categories. But a good majority do. Most of them fall under #1 and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Google fell into #1 and look where they are today. Just keep these things in mind when requiring a signed NDAs before you will give out any info.

Conclusion

There has been quite a bit of discussion lately (especially on Hacker News) about whether or not to sign NDAs. Most of the recent articles I have read are simply titled “I Will Not Sign Your NDA”. I feel that NDAs have there place, but you should sign them only with extreme caution. Examine each NDA on a case by case basis and determine how it will affect your business in the long run.

*Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer and do not claim to be giving any real legal advice. I am simply stating how I do things. Make sure to consult with a lawyer before engaging in any contracts.

One of my common hangups with these kind of posts is the lack of history as to what lead people to these consulting gigs. Where were you before, and how long were you there?

I found this to be a very valid point. Far too often you see guys posting their end of the year profits from their consulting gigs and they make it sound extremely easy. This can be dangerous as joe n00b might be so inspired that he quits his job and jumps right into the deep end without first preparing himself and assessing the risks involved.

That being said, I wanted to write a bit about my backstory and how it ultimately lead to my ability to strike it out on my own as a consultant. I have read stories similar to mine and there are a few key points that seem to be common, which I will highlight as I go.

In the summer of 2008, I was preparing to enter my senior year of college for Computer Science at UNM. A quick note about CS in New Mexico. There are TONS of government contractors (Sandia, Ultramain, Honeywell, Lockheed, etc.) in NM and college CS courses seem very much tailored to preparing students to head down this road towards one of these contractors. This is where most of my buddies from college ultimately ended up.

So, like any good UNM CS student, I got a job at Intel hacking C# tools for their engineers to use during testing. It was fine, but I knew I could not work in a cube forever.

Around that time, one of my buddies had the original iPhone and I was crazy jealous. I think I had some silly Windows CE brick or a Palm Treo or something. It was obvious that the iPhone was the “next big thing” and I took notice. So I started developing web apps for the iPhone, as that was the primary way to get custom apps for the devices. Apple even had a terrible (non mobile formatted) interface for exploring such web apps.

I built cool things like a Weight Watchers Point Calculator (my wife’s idea) and Minesweeper and to my surprise made a couple bucks a day on ads. This really fueled my excitement. Then, Apple announced the official SDK.

An Aventure In iCodeBlog And Other NDA Violations

When Apple first released the SDK, the App Store didn’t exist yet. All developers were forced under Apple’s NDA, stating that we weren’t able to discuss any aspect of the SDK on the web. As you can imagine, this left very little resources available for learning how to actually do development. There were no blogs, no books, and the only source of information was Apple’s documentation. I saw this as a HUGE opportunity.

I very quickly registered the domain icodeblog.com and setup WordPress. This led to my very first post in July of 2008. I had no idea what I was doing; it was my first blog ever, but I knew I would be able to learn more effectively if I was teaching others as I went along.

Being a Java developer, I was comfortable reading documentation so I dug right in to the iOS docs. I spent all of my free time (the time that wasn’t spent with my wife) learning and blogging. I was violating the NDA by discussing it on the web, but my page views were growing every day. Other blogs started to sprout up but I soon had the most popular iOS development blog on the web. I had over 10K RSS subscribers one month after my blog launch.

Things were really exciting, however, I had to start thinking about my future and how I was going to support my family. Still being a bit narrow-minded with my career choices, I applied for a job at Lockheed Martin and got a position. It was all set; I would graduate college in the spring and head to the “cube farm”. Destined for a life of “here’s your input, give me this output”, TPS Reports, and other corporate stereotype jokes…

That’s when I got my first iOS programming job offer…

Enter RightSprite

As you can imagine, the popularity of iCodeBlog did not go unnoticed. I received job inquiries quite often and one them happened to be from a guy who lived in Ireland named Jonathan. He was a wealthy American entrepreneur who had added a mobile offering to his already successful rails consultancy called RightSprite. However, he started his business by outsourcing to the Ukraine, which yielded fairly poor results.

So, in the winter of 2008 I received an email that they wanted to purchase iCodeBlog and give me a job replacing their outsourced team. He also happened to have an employee in NM named Josh. Josh and I met at a “hip” food place that I had never heard of and I was blown away that this was considered “business”. Needless to say, I was excited.

So here I am, about to graduate with a perfect job lined up, and I get an offer like this. I had no idea what to do. The idea of working remote was foreign to me and had never even crossed my mind. People can actually do that? I can work in my pajamas??

So I decided to take a risk, sell him my blog, and accept the job offer. I was terrified-especially when he told me that my first check was coming out of his personal bank account and that was why it was late. Little did I know, this would be one of the best career decisions I could ever make…

Build, Hire, Repeat

I graduated from college and my career was in full swing. I was the sole developer at a consultancy that had more mobile work than it knew what to do with. My family had no idea what I did. They though I was a drug dealer or something just as lucrative. At one point, my grandma asked me, “When are you going to get a real job like your cousin Michael (he works for the city)”. I could’t quite believe this was a legitimate job myself.

Things started to get very exciting. Jonathan asked me to help hire our next employee. Luckily, a guy by the name of Collin reached out to me and asked if he could guest blog on iCodeBlog. A few tutorials later and we offered him a job.

RightsSprite continued to scale up and I helped hire quite a few new developers. They eventually moved to a physical building in Portland, Oregon while I still worked remotely from NM. The team continued to grow.

A Book Deal

Even though I didn’t own iCodeBlog anymore, I still contributed to it from time to time. This lead to me being contacted by a few publishing companies with book offers. A book offer? It doesn’t sound that cool now, but in 2009, when there weren’t many iOS development books, it sounded incredible.

I decided to go with Manning Publishing and I updated their iPhone development book from web app-centric to SDK-centric. It amazed me that I struggled to write four paragraph essays in high school but I was now writing a four hundred page book with ease.

The book did fairly well and sold around 10,000 copies. Unfortunately, when you are an author of a tech book, that amounts to just about nothing in profit. As you can imagine, I had little motivation to do the update the next year when Apple updated the SDK.

A New Sheriff In Town

Shortly after moving the offices to Portland, the owner sold the company and we had a new president and CEO. He ran things a bit differently but ultimately things were cruising forward. Our team continued to expand and eventually I hired our first Android developers.

In December of 2011, I was promoted to the Director of Mobile Engineering. It was a fancy title and I was entirely proud to hand out business cards with that printed on them. I had helped build the team up to around sixteen mobile developers and it was now my job to manage them, as well as work closely with sales to land larger contracts.

2012 was a great year of working on cool projects including the Food Network and Google Fiber TV. I got to attend WWDC and spend a few weeks on Google’s campuses.

Things Get Shaken Up

Little did I know, there was some unrest in the company with the higher-up managers. One day, there was a company memo that the three people who were higher ranked than myself had all left. There were rumors as to why they left, but no one really had the true story. This caused a stir in the company and a few more developers began to follow suit.

This, of course, led to some company restructuring which put me right at the top with one other team member. I was now one of the highest paid people in the company and solely in charge of the entire mobile team.

I thought everything was perfect until one day in December of 2012, I received the following message when I logged into Gmail:

Your account has been suspended, please contact the administrator.

This made me considerably suspicious. I knew there was a lot of restructuring in the recent history and I immediately wondered if I was next on the chopping block. I was logged into Linked In at the time and noticed the company owner was the last person to view my profile. “He suspects me of looking for other jobs and is checking up on me”, I thought.

That’s when I received a message on Skype from him. It said:

Brandon, do you have time to talk?

My heart jumped into my throat. I knew what was coming next. He was soon up on video chat and proceeded to tell me that the company was undergoing some restructuring and my position has been eliminated. “Eliminated?” I thought. And then I asked him what that meant for me. He repeated the sentence again, said thanks, and hung up. That was it; I no longer had a job.

My “secure” job that I had been working at for four years disappeared in a matter of seconds with very little “real” explanation. I was speechless.

Taking The Plunge

After getting “let go”, I took the rest of the day off and went out with my family (wife and two kids). We were shocked, but I knew what I had to do. It was what I had been dreaming of doing for quite some time.

Armed with the knowledge of the entire software pipeline-from sales, to development, to maintenance-I hit the ground running the very next day in search of my first contract.

It has been a little over a year since I’ve had a “secure” job. I put that word in quotes because I now believe the only way to have a secure career is to make one for yourself. You could be let go at any time, for any reason.

I was very fortunate to have a first job that allowed me to learn the needed skills to do what I’m passionate about; building consumer facing apps that get used by thousands of people. If you want to do the same, I would encourage you to find a job that lets you explore all of the aspects of consulting to find out if it’s right for you.

Sometimes I wonder why everyone is not a consultant. It feels so free to be able to hack outside on a nice day or go sailing with my buddies on a random Wednesday. But that’s just one side of the coin. Other days, I wonder why I am even doing it. I often wish I had a simple job with a well-defined task where once I got “off work”, I could go home and not think about it again until the next day but I don’t have that luxury. There are real risks and stresses involved with working for yourself so I urge you to weigh them out before taking the plunge.

I have received so many good questions through my last few posts about consulting. They have inspired me and I intend on taking this year to diligently blog about topics such as finding clients, health insurance, contracts, etc.

So please share and subscribe; I hope to help you on your journey to becoming free of your corporate chains.

Wow, I can’t believe it has already been a full year since I struck it out on my own. Last year, I published a post after my first month on doing contract iOS development. Needless to say, I have grown and learned quite a bit over the past year and I wanted to share some of those experiences.

Income

While I won’t share exact numbers, I left my 6 figure/year job to pursue the indie/consulting life. During the course of the year, I was able to amass 40% more income in 2013 than I had at my previous position.

In addition to that, I had the time to launch a couple iOS applications and thus upping my Apple income by about 20% this year.

Network Network Network

I would say spending time networking and meeting people is just as important as being able to write code if you want to be successful on your own. Through out the year, I dedicated at least five to ten hours a week just meeting with people, talking on the phone, and making new connections.

Often times, I would get contract opportunities that I knew for sure that I wasn’t going to take; either because I didn’t love the project, or (more often than not) because I didn’t have the bandwidth to take them on. However, rather than just writing the client back “I don’t have time“, I would take the call (or meeting in town), make the connection, and even listen to details about the contract.

My wife would tell me to stop wasting my time and that those hours would be better spent on project work that actually made money. However, these contacts are arguably more valuable than the hours “lost”. In many situations, I have reached out to those potential clients weeks or months later once I hired a new developer and was then able signed a contract. If I had declined the meeting to begin with, they probably wouldn’t have been as inclined to work with me so readily.

Subcontractors

Subcontracting has been a mixed bag for me. It seems to be the only (safe-ish) way to expand your business as a consultant, other than hiring full time developers. So, if you want to be able to work less yourself (which is almost never the case) or increase your companies revenue, you need to hire out.

Once I found the right people, subcontracting was a dream. I was able to reach more clients, still deliver the same value in the work, and achieve the client’s goals, all while expanding my business.

The main challenge I have had is deciding whether to hire subcontractors from here in the states or “offshore”. They both have their benefits and complications. Here are some I have found:

Benefits of hiring in the states:

Communication – Most of the time their timezones are close enough that one of you is not inconvenienced to communicate in real time.

Trust From Clients – Some clients still have some issues with “offshore”, especially because many of them have tried their hand at the ODesk lottery and have lost. So, saying you have US based team members sometimes makes them more comfortable. It’s unfortunate, but I have seen it to be true in some cases.

Colleagues – Often times you already know or have worked with these guys since starting with acquaintances/friends is a good place to look for developers.

Complications hiring in the states

Cost – US devs are expensive. Most of the time they have full time jobs and want to do consulting on the side. So it is important that they get paid more to do contract work than their day job pays.

Colleagues – This is on the negative list as well because hiring people you know can get weird if things go awry.

Benefit of Offshore developers

Cost – I put this here, however that doesn’t mean I hire “cheap” developers. Honestly, if you are not paying a contractor well, you are either under paying him and should give him a raise OR he shouldn’t be working for you as he’s probably too junior.

Perspective – I have some incredible developers in other countries that have taught me quite a bit whether it’s about development, process, culture, or even my own code. It’s a great opportunity to learn.

Problems with Offshore developers

Location – Timezone issues can be a problem if you let them. For example, I have a developer who lives in a completely different timezone than my own. However, he does a fantastic job of being available when he is needed. I have had other instances where it was very challenging to reach my developer in an event where I needed information on short notice.

Vetting Process – Finding developers is a little more tricky. With devs in the states, you can just head to a local meet up or conference, but finding GOOD “offshore” devs is a little trickier. I have lucked out a few times, but for the most part it’s a bit more work. I would suggest spending a little of your own money to adequately search and vet each candidate.

Language – While doing iOS development, you may need your client and your developer to communicate with one another. That being said, it’s vital to find a developer who you can understand and who can understand you in order to make communication possible.

Hiring An Assistant

Taking a page from Tim Ferris’ 4 Hour Work Week, I decided to hire an assistant. Ferris suggests “virtual”, however, I have hired one locally (she’ll be proofreading this post ). I think it’s one of the best decisions I have made as a business owner. Here is just a short list of things she handles for me:

Contracts

Invoicing

Payments of contractors

Research

Phone calls

Personal issues (like returns, purchasing equipment, etc.)

Even if she saves me two hours per week, she has paid for herself, and believe me, she saves me much more than that.

Never Decline A Contract

I mentioned this earlier in the post, but I want to reiterate it here. I seldom tell clients “no” and I really feel that it has worked out to my benefit. At the very least, I hear them out and add them as a contact to keep in mind for the future.

What I generally do when I can’t take on a client is I will give them an estimate of when myself or a member of my team will be available. That way, if they are okay with the timeline, I can keep the pipeline open. If not, there is no harm done. Also, if I hire another developer before the time I said I was available, sometimes the client will still have the need and I am able to fill it.

If I absolutely don’t have time or don’t want a particular contract, I will refer the client out to other dev shops. I don’t look at this as competition, but rather opportunity as I would hope they would do the same for me one day. As an added bonus, some of them have a referral fee so you can at least profit from pairing the client up.

Taxes

I have found out that taxes are less fun when you are self-employed than when you are employed by a business. Luckily my wife is MUCH better at money management than I am, so she set up a separate tax account where roughly 40% of our income would go.

One of the other good decisions I made besides hiring an assistant was hiring a CPA. She has saved me countless hours and fees and is worth her weight in gold.

Hire a CPA from day one; you will never regret it.

Family

I know this is a “business” related post, but I have to mention this. Having a wife and kids, I am very much a family man. Working for myself has been such a blessing since I have been able to spend considerably more time with my family than when I was employed by someone else.

For example, if it’s a nice summer day and the family decides to head to the zoo, I can just go without asking a boss for time off or taking PTO. I simply work in the evening or more hours the next day to recoup the time. Personal time management is key to be able to have this kind of freedom.

Summary

Overall, 2013 was an incredible year. While I did make mistakes (a ton), I gained so much knowledge and had a blast doing so. Going solo isn’t for everyone (some days I wonder why everyone isn’t doing it, and others I wonder why I am), but it’s been one of the most exciting experiences of my life.

I look forward to what 2014 brings and seeing how I can continue to grow my consultancy.

One thing I am often asked is “Where can I find good developers/contractors/subcontractors?” While I have found talent many different ways, I wanted to share my top 5 with you.

This post should be useful to you if you have a project and are looking to find a developer OR are a developer looking to subcontract some of your work. I am sharing these based solely on my experiences with them and hope you find value in this list.

1. Local Meetups

Local meet ups are the absolute best place in my opinion to find developers. Almost every city in the nation has some sort of group meeting on a regular bases for a given focus of development. You should have no problems finding a rails meetup group, iOS, Android, etc…

I would suggest finding out about such meetups in your area by Googling phrases such as “[your area] iOS meetup (sub iOS for rails, python, etc…). I regularly attend a “Cocoa Heads” group full of incredibly smart and capable mobile developers all willing to work on projects.

These types of groups are always excited to have clients come in and pitch their ideas. One piece of advice though, don’t go in to these groups and start with “I have a great idea and I will give you a percentage of the company in exchange for development”. They will stop listening immediately.

2. Popular Developers/Mailing Lists

This one is going to require a bit of work and research on your part, but I will get you started. Around the internet, there are a few of what I call “celebrity developers”. These are generally guys who have made a name for themselves and who are established as experts in their space.

While many of them are not taking on contract work themselves, they may or may not have a mailing list of interested contractors. One such person that does exactly this is Ray Wenderlich and I happen to receive emails on his contractor list.

Even if these developers don’t have lists, they generally have plenty of connections to point you in the right direction. Like I said, this method isn’t easy, but it can definitely have one of the biggest payoffs in terms of quality developers.

3. Specialize Project Sites

As of late, quite a few interesting sites have been popping up that have solved a fundamental issue when it comes to pairing developers with projects. The problems are 1. it’s hard to find good developers and 2. it’s hard to find clients with realistic cost expectations. That’s why ODesk exists

The first of these sites that I have found is OOOMF. OOOMF is relatively new and you must be reviewed and accepted by their team in order to be a part of it. It’s basically a private network for pairing developers with projects and it supports all different project types (mobile, web, design, etc…).

Project owners can put their project up with a relative budget and developers can “apply”. The process then moves forward with communication between the client and the developers until a price and scope have been reached.

There is an additional overhead of 15% for using this service, but I think it’s well worth it.

Another one of these sites that is more mobile centric is http://apphappening.com. This site is very new and I have only just begun to use it. I should have a better review of them shortly.

4. Twitter and App.net

Twitter and app.net are definitely the preferred social network of serious developers. I would steer clear of Facebook and Linked in as this is generally where the recruiters hang out. Your message will most likely get dismissed as spam.

I’d suggest searching Twitter/App.net for the keywords of your project (iOS developer, rails, etc…) and find the folks with a ton of follows and a very small following to follower ratio. You will know them right away. Also, most of their blogs come up first in Google for many related keywords.

5. Developer Conferences

This one might cost you a bit of money, but is definitely well worth it. There are conferences for every focus of software development and they occur all throughout the year. These conferences generally have a HUGE percentage of professional developers who are just as eager to work on a project as you are to have them.

One of my favorite iOS conferences is 360iDev. It’s very indie-centric and offers an incredible community of iOS developers of all abilities. If you are looking to get a mobile project done, I strongly urge you to attend. While I can’t speak for conferences in other areas(web, etc..), I would really love some suggestions in the comments of this post if you are up for it!

6. Bonus – Right Here

Shameless plug time. If you are looking for professional mobile app (iOS or Android), I have a team of developers and am always looking to work on new and exciting projects. If you want to hear more about it head over to my Hire Me page and shoot me an email brandon @ brandontreb [dot] com.

Conclusion

Whether you are a person/company looking to hire developers or a developer looking to hire contractors, I hope you have found this post useful. Your feedback in the comments is greatly appreciated. Best of luck with your search!

Welcome to the second part of my tutorial series “Creating An Image Gallery Like Over”. In this part of the tutorial, you will learn how to actually display the photos in the UICollectionView as well as give the user the ability to take photos with their camera.

This is an IBOutlet to a UIImageView that we will create inside of the Storyboard

We overwrite the setter method for the asset in order to convert the asset’s thumbnail into a UIImage and set it to the contents of the UIImageView

Now that we have the custom cell created, we need to hook it up and create the UIImageView inside of Storyboard. Open MainStoryboard.storyboard and click on the default UICollectionViewCell inside of your UICollectionView.

It might be tricky to see the cell as it has a white background and blends in, but it’s there.

Now, click on the Identity Inspector from the right side bar and change the class to PhotoCell. This will inform interface builder that this object is of the type PhotoCell and let us hook up the photoImageView outlet.

Next, open the size inspector, change the size to Custom, the width to 104 and the height to 104. This will give us nice sized images, with a good amount of padding between them.

The UICollectionView will overwrite these sizes, so we need to change it in one other location. To ensure that the cells stay the correct size, click on the Collection View in left side bar and open it’s Size Inspector. Then set the Cell Size width and height to 104.

The final step here is to drag a UIImageView on to your cell (scaling it to fit the entire cell size), and hook up the IBOutlet to the photoImageView. Do this by control-click and dragging from Photo Cell to the ImageView and selecting photoImageView.

If you build and run at this stage, nothing will be different. That’s because we still need to tell the ViewController class about our new PhotoCell. Open ViewController.m and import PhotoCell.h.

#import "PhotoCell.h"

Now, head down to the collectionView:cellForItemAtIndexPath method and replace the contents of it with the following code:

What’s changed here is, we are now telling the UICollectionView that the cell it’s returning is of the type PhotoCell. Also, we are fetching the ALAsset out of our array at each index and sending it to the cell so that it can display it’s thumbnail.

Build And Run!

Whoohoo! You should now see your photos populating the UICollectionView. Congratulations!

While, this is definitely cool, you might now be wondering “how do I select a photo?”. Great question, and here is the solution.

2. Selecting Photos

Now that you have all of the groundwork in place, selecting photos from the collection could not be easier. Open up ViewController.m and replace the collectionView:didSelectItemAtIndexPath method with the following code:

This will get the selected asset and convert it to a UIImage. You are now free to use the UIImage how you want. Perhaps you create a protocol for this class and make a callback to a delegate OR maybe you add this to a UINavigationController stack and push a new view controller on to the stack containing this image. The sky is the limit!

If you look at the Over app and back to your image gallery that you just created, you will notice something is still missing. What if the user wants to take a photo or access other albums? This is where Over adds a bar across the top of the interface with 2 buttons that fall back to the “default” style of fetching images if the user wants to take a photo or access a different photo album. Let’s build this out now.

3. Building The Interface To Take Photos And Access Albums

Start by setting up the IBActions for theses buttons. Open ViewController.m and add the following empty methods:

We don’t need to add the code yet since we still need to build the UI and hook up the IBOutlets. Now open MainStoryboard.storyboard and drag a UIView right on top of your UIView.

One issue you might run in to here is the view will want to become a subview of the collection view. To combat this, drag the view outside of the collection view inside the left bar so the hierarchy will look like this:

One other “gotcha” is, you must ensure that the view is positioned below the collection view in this list, otherwise it won’t show above it on screen.

Now, let’s manually size and position the view as Interface Building will make things hard on us if we want to position it over our collection view.

Select the view and open the Size Inspector. Set the values as follows:

Again, remember this positioning is optimized for the iPhone 5. So make sure you are testing with that simulator or you won’t see this bar.

After this, the bar still won’t be visible inside of Interface Builder. We need to set the background color to black with some transparency. Open the Attributes Inspector and click on the background color. Then set the color to black with 80% opacity:

You should now see the bar positioned on the screen like this:

Now drag a UIButton on to the view you just created. There are a few things that must be done to style the button:

Position it at 0,0

Set the width to 160px and the height to 70x

Change the type to custom

Change the text to “Take Photo”

Change the font to “Helvetica Neue Condensed Black” size 20

Set the text color to white

When you have completed these steps, the button should look like this:

Now, hook up the IBAction by opening the Connections Inspector and dragging from Touch Up Inside to the View Controller object and selecting takePhotoButtonTapped:

Finally, duplicate this button (copy and paste), rename the title to “Albums”, move it next to the “Take Photo” button and hook its Touch Up Inside to albumsButtonTapped:

The final Interface should look like this:

Go ahead and do a Build and Run and this stage and marvel at your interface development prowess!

4. Actually Taking Photos And Accessing Albums

The final step for this tutorial is to implement the code to bring up the camera as well as bring up the photo albums. Let’s start with the camera. Open ViewController.m and add the following code to the takePhotosButtonTapped: method:

As I said before, this method is almost identical with the only difference being, we are using UIImagePickerControllerSourceTypePhotoLibrary to open up the photo albums.

Build and Run and tap the “Take Photo” button. Make sure you are testing on the device at this stage or nothing will happen since the simulator doesn’t have a camera. You can however test the “Albums” button assuming you have some photos in your photo library.

Now that you are able to pick a photo, you need to be able to access the photo that was selected or taken. To do this implement the following delegate method for UIImagePickerController.

This method fetches the selected (or taken) image and stores. It then dismisses the camera or photo albums allowing you to do whatever is needed with the image.

5. Next Steps

By now, you should have learned how to use the ALAssets library to interact with a user’s photos and use them to build a custom interface. You also learned how to use a UICollectionView to display a grid of photos.

With this knowledge in hand, you should now be able to make much more interesting photo selection interfaces than the default one Apple has to offer. Other apps like Google+ and Instagram both have very slick photo pickers and I hope this tutorial has your gears going thinking about other interesting photo selection interfaces.

Recently, I have had to build an app (download link) that required the user to choose a photo from their photo library. Rather than just throwing up a UIImagePickerController like many apps, I decided to add a little bit of style. Being inspired by Over’s ultra simplistic (and beautiful) photo selection interface, I decided to fancy things up a bit.

For this tutorial, I will start with a Fresh iOS6 View-Based application that uses Storyboards and ARC. Also note that I will be optimizing for the iPhone 5 resolution. You are free to make the tweaks necessary to deploy on the iPhone 4 and 4S.

Here is a breakdown of what we will cover in this part:

Creating a UICollectionView inside of Storyboard

Using the ALAssetsLibrary to fetch photos from the user’s Camera Roll

Displaying the ALAssets inside of the UICollectionView

1. Preparing The IBOutlets

Start by opening up ViewController.m and replacing the @interface declaration at the top with the following code:

This will declare the IBOutlet needed to hook up the main UICollectionView that we will be using to display the user’s photos. I have also set up our class to be a UICollectionViewDataSource, UICollectionViewDelegate, and UICollectionViewDelegateFlowLayout. This is necessary when interfacing with the UICollectionView.

2. Setting Up The UICollectionView In Storyboard

Open up MainStoryboard.storyboard and drag a UICollectionView on to your view ensuring that it stretches the entire screen.

Then, Control-Click and drag from the UICollectionView to your ViewController Object and set it as the delegate and datasource.

Finally, Control-Click and drag from View Controller to Collection View and selected collectionView to make the IBOutlet connection.

Now, we need to give a Cell Identifier to the UICollectionViewCell so that we can reference it in code. Click on the default cell inside of the UICollectionView and open the Attributes Inspector. For the Identifier type in PhotoCell. The cell might be a little tricky to see as its background color is clear, but it’s there. Simply click in the top left corner of the UICollectionView.

Now that the UICollectionView has been set up, it’s time to fetch the photos from the user’s photo library.

If you are using the simulator, make sure to populate the Photo Gallery with images from the web. Simply open up a browser, do a Google Image Search, and click and hold on various images. You should have an option from the menu that pops up to save the images to your camera roll.
Finally, open up the Photos app on the simulator to initialize the Assets Library.

3. Fetching ALAssets (user photos) From The ALAssets Library

In order to interface with the user’s photo library, we must first import the AssetsLibrary.framework framework. To do this, click on your project in the sidebar, select the Target, then click Build Phases, expand the Link Binary With Libraries section and click the + button. Do a search for Assset and then double click on AssetsLibrary.framework.

It should now be added to your project and ready to use. Now that it has been linked, we must import it into the ViewController.m file. Open up ViewController.m and add the following import to the top of the file:

#import <AssetsLibrary/AssetsLibrary.h>

Before we can fetch the user’s photos, we need to set up an NSArray to put them in. Add the following line within the @interface declaration at the top.

This is a static method that creates a static instance to the ALAssetsLibrary. The reason this is needed is, when we enumerate the ALAssets in the next method, it seems that the assets get released immediately and otherwise wouldn’t be able to be used in the rest of the application. I will explain this a little more in a moment.

This code should be fairly straight forward if you have ever worked with a UITableView. The only lines to note are where ‘cell.asset = asset’ is commented out and we set the cell’s background color to red. We will uncomment that line when we create a custom cell to display the image (for now it won’t). I have also set the background color to red so that you can see that the number of cells is actually corresponding to the number of photos in the camera roll.

Build and Run!

Let’s take a break to do a build and run to see what happens. If you have hooked everything up correctly, you should see a black screen with red squares on it with a count equalling the number of photos in the user’s library.

Not too exciting, however it shows that we are displaying a number of cells corresponding to the number of photos in the user’s asset library. At least it’s showing that you have done something. The next step is to create a custom UICollectionViewCell that actually displays the photos, which we will do next time.

5. Next Time

That’s all for today. In a ploy to get you to come back to my site (and subscribe to my RSS feed), I have chosen to break this post up into two parts.

Luckily for you, I wrote the above message a while ago. Click the link below to go to part 2!